Run your Agribusiness better with SAP Business One
For centuries agriculture has been the backbone of the economic system of a country. With a growing a population, the demand for agricultural products is increasing. At the same time, so does the need for technology and processes that can improve the efficiency of farming to improve yield and productivity.
As an agribusiness of today, you’ll experience the common pain areas of the industry, things such as maintaining crop quality, appropriate soil conditions, efficient management of manures and fertilisers, crop processing and so on.
In this blog, we’re going to explore how an ERP system like SAP Business One can actively manage all the business operations of your agribusiness to make it run better. You will see how SAP Business One can help you run your business profitably and more sustainably, while driving new growth through innovation.
SAP Business One for the Agricultural industry
SAP Business One is a comprehensive business management solution that provides a complete holistic overview of your business processes by integrating all core functions including accounts and finance, inventory, sales and customer relationships, project management, operations, and HR. Based on real-time information, with all the correct data and information in one place, it allows you to access accurate intelligence, identify trends, and make informed decisions that drive profitable growth.
SAP Business One is used by businesses across a wide range of industries across the world. In the agricultural industry, it helps to create transparent systems and supply food chains, improving the efficiency of farming operations and reducing costs. Let’s take a deeper look at how.
Why choose SAP Business One for your agriculture business?
By integrating your core business processes, in a nutshell SAP Business One will enable you to:
Increase the efficiency of your farming & related activities, driving profit to your bottom line
Respond to growing customer demand
Create transparent and sustainable food supply chains
Manage supply and price volatility
Control risk management
Now let’s take a deeper look into the key functionalities of SAP Business One for agribusinesses:
Farm Profile
Helps to accurately map the crop and land infrastructure of the farm. Maintain accurate information on farmland, number of sites, plots, packhouses and cold storages. SAP B1 can provide up-to-date stock at all farm locations.
Contract Farming
Deals with farmer registration, creating contracts, procurement and recording of goods issued or services provided to farmers. It provides contract farming companies with crops of their desired quality and ensures improved incomes for farmers. SAP B1 can help in optimising these contracts to ensure better market exposure for smallholders and improved agricultural outcomes.
Planning
SAP B1 helps agribusinesses to plan their farm activities more efficiently. The planning module uses the current stock and any available forecast to recommend purchase as well as production plans. This helps by reducing waste materials.
Production
SAP B1 streamlines the production activities of agribusinesses by offering a range of effective solutions in the production module. It helps in keeping track of farm-level or greenhouse activities as well as recording the use of on-field resources. It also assists in capturing the plot-wise and activity-wise details of man, machinery and material. With the production module, field observation processes also become a lot simpler with on-field photographs and videos.
Post Production
This involves post harvest processes such as quality control, packhouse operations, cleaning, grading, processing, packing. It also deals with converting raw materials to finished goods and tracking wastage or pilferage. With SAP B1 you can optimise the post production cycle of your agribusiness to ensure maximum returns for your products.
Quality Control
Create your own quality parameter templates and define various quality control stages for your crop production processes. With field QC, arrival QC and finished goods QC, SAP B1 helps you to perform quality checks at various production and post production stages. Users can also keep assessment records and determine results of batch-wise quality checks.
Purchase
This module deals with purchase related operations such as purchase requests and purchase order. It enables users to easily procure materials as well as services as per their requirements. Users can track purchasing transactions with your suppliers so stock and production users can get accurate estimates on when the goods will be delivered.
Inventory
Simply the tracking of stock levels across multiple farms, multiple sites and multiple stores. Users are enabled to issue and receive goods as well as transfer, return or even discard of goods with this module. It also helps in ensuring cost-savings by keeping inventory at minimum levels.
Batch Management
One of the most sensitive areas when dealing with agricultural goods is how to track the production and expiration date of the goods. The batch management feature allows everything to be tracked and managed from the purchasing point, to production to the selling point to customers.
Sales
This covers the processes of sales booking, sales order, and delivery and dispatch. It enables the sale of finished goods with the help of customer-wise order management. This module is linked with the inventory module, so inventory levels are updated after every successful sale.
Accounts
Helps users to keep track of all their accounting transactions and enables them to make better decisions. Complete account-keeping and financial report generation can also help in having good control over finances.
Farmer Extension
Farmer extension helps in strengthening the capabilities of farmers with the transfer of adequate agricultural knowledge and skills. It involves the recording of training programs and farmer visits. Farmer extension keeps farmers updated about the latest trends and educates them on how to capitalise on them.
Analytics
This module can play a vital role in transforming your agricultural data into powerful decision making tools. With AI-based predictive analytics, this module can help in employing the right procedures to improve farm efficiency and crop productivity. The provision of complex agricultural metrics in the form of data visualisations can also help users in making better decisions.
CRM & Marketing
Stay ahead of competitors with opportunity and pipeline management, customer relationship management and campaign management.
Service Maintenance
This concerns the maintenance and in-house service of all farm and plant equipment. Maintain preventive maintenance schedules and ad hoc repairs job cards integrated with inventory and purchasing for sub-contracted maintenance.
Weight Bridge Integration
Improve controls by ensuring actual net weights get recorded during good receipts, transfers or dispatch.
How will QBMS help improve your agribusiness with SAP Business One?
We have extensive experience of helping businesses to grow through technology in a wide range of industries including agriculture. We offer a tailored approach that’s thorough, cost-efficient and focused on delivering financial results.
Whilst there are common challenges facing all agricultural business, when it comes to ERP systems, we understand that everyone’s needs are different. So, we don’t offer an ‘off the shelf’ consultancy and rigid processes. Instead, we will work to understand your business goals to create focused, streamlined processes and efficiencies to achieve them.
This ensures you quickly see clearly understandable and useable data and management information. Get in touch today on the details below to learn how we can transform your agricultural business processes.